Samsung QLED TV Epic Fail [*UPDATED*]

On November 10, 2018, my family set out on a quest. A quest to find a nice new television to place on the living room wall. Sure, it seemed like your average, everyday trip to Best Buy… Little did I know it would turn into a series of events of “Samsung Epic Fail” proportions… I know that Samsung has its hand full with another, more popular epic fail at the moment, the horribly designed Galaxy Fold “smart” phone. But the large failure that is the Q7F series of TVs has received little attention apart from the 30, 31, 32 pages of complaints on Samsung’s community forum. Read on for a deeper dive into this roller coaster ride, which is still not over.*

On the surface, the Samsung Q7F series of televsions looks like a great, albeit expensive, product line. To this day, the product still rates 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon.com:

Anyway, the television was delivered in an acceptable time frame. Not the fastest, but acceptable. The picture quality was great. No complaints. It was a pretty smart TV. The story goes downhill after the break…

During the morning of April 11, 2019, things started to unravel. Almost five months to the day after purchasing the TV, the screen started powering on and off all by itself. No button presses, no unusual input signal. Just this:

A few rudimentary troubleshooting steps reveal no real obvious solutions. A quick Google search for “samsung q7f turning off and on” reveals 44,600 results. The top result links to this page on the Samsung Community Forums:

As stated, there are currently 30, 31, 32 pages in this on-going saga-thread. And it seems very few people are seeing any actual successful responses from Samsung.

I’d been trying to give Samsung an opportunity to fix this problem. I hadn’t written anything about this situation online until now. I’ve been taking the Samsung script approach to this since it started.

I first chatted online with a Samsung script reader that night of April 11. An edited copy of that chat session follows:

So, eventually I did get in contact with the suggested Samsung Authorized Service Center, even if it is 2 hours and 45 minutes from my house. I don’t have to drive it.

Fast-forward to this evening, when my Samsung authorized representative finally arrived. He brought a OneConnect box and a replacement cable with him. I thought for sure one of those components was the problem. From 5:23 pm to 5:30 pm this authorized representative worked diligently to… Wait. He basically plugged in the replacement box and replacement cable… waited for all of 30 seconds and declared “it must be the screen.”

No real troubleshooting.

I did ask if he has seen this problem before. It seems that he has, but not to the point he would admit it was a wide-spread issue. Anyway, at this point it sounds like our diligent representative will report back to Samsung that the screen needs fixed or replaced, and it will be at Samsung’s discretion which method it will be.

Current Next Steps:

So I’ve decided to blog about this experience. 😐 So that everyone else who has this problem may learn from it. As of today, April 23, this is obviously not over. I will continue to update this post with new information as I work through the resolution process. I’m a little bit perplexed as to why Samsung would release this product with some obvious glaring issues (pages upon pages of complaints) and still no real solutions. I’ve not ruled out the very real possibility of seeking a class-action suit against Samsung to get this resolved. If anyone else feels the same, just reach out to me.

[Update] Where we are today, April 30:

After a good bit of back-and-forth via e-mail and phone calls, along with a Samsung rep from the Samsung Community website, I finally set up a new televsision today. I’m not 100% satisfied, however, due to the circumstances involving the swap-out.

First of all, the good news. Samsung was able to work out a deliver-return-replace type of return, which made my life easier during the replacement. But that’s the end of the good news…

After getting in touch with Best Buy, we were given the option of getting a replacement TV or getting store credit. Unfortunately, the model of the television that broke is no longer being sold. (I think I can guess why.) So, essentially, I am given the only option of store credit. Which sounds great, until you start trying to shop for a TV similar to the one you just returned. The 2019 models with a OneConnect box started at a much higher price than we were given in credit. Of course, maybe the OneConnect box and thin cable were the root of all the Off/On/Off problems.

Anyway, essentially we settled on a Samsung Q60R that was the same price as the Q7F. It does seem to be a bit “faster” or more responsive than the Q7F, but I don’t seem to have the same selection of Apps from the Samsung store (Plex is gone, 😡 so I have to depend on a Roku to play back local content and it’s not 4K….) and the lack of a OneConnect box is quite disappointing. The mess of wires is pretty unsightly… I have to work out a solution to that.

So, the good news: I have a working 4K television. The bad news: It’s not the one I would have preferred for the money I spent. I essentially got the 2019 version of the model “below” last year’s for the same price. So that’s unsatisfying.

Thanks to SamsungJam, SamsungDarius, and SamsungSamantha for reaching out and staying in touch through the community website. If not for that method of communication, I don’t know if I ever would have gotten a solution. All in all, I’m about 60% satisfied with this process.